‘Bride kidnapping’ continues to exist in the Hmong’s cultural tradition as this beautifully shot, eye-opening Vietnamese documentary shows us with raw authenticity and empathy the life of a 12-year-old Hmong girl pushed towards the fate of a prospective marriage.
Purportedly the first-ever documentary made (or more accurately, staged) in the history of the medium, Flaherty’s eye-opening and intimate look at an Inuit family living in a harsh and cold environment poses age-old questions of authenticity and truth.
Eighteen persons with personal connections to the political, social and cultural history of Shanghai share their recollections in Jia Zhangke’s somewhat stolid documentary, where the sum feels lesser than its parts.
It’s not easy to do a documentary about the life and work of arguably the world’s most extraordinary film composer, but Cinema Paradiso director Giuseppe Tornatore just about makes it work as it captures the sheer breadth and range of the maestro’s legacy.
Loznitsa expertly puts footage together from Leningrad in August 1991 as tens of thousands of nervous Russians filled the streets, with the political fate of their country hanging in the balance after communist hardliners staged what would become a failed coup d’état to revive the collapsing Soviet Union.
Despite the lack of narration to contextualise the historical footage, Loznitsa’s approach of letting the picture paint a thousand words convincingly shows us the abject reality of millions of Russians who suffered greatly during the devastating Leningrad blockade of WWII.
An essential African documentary about the brutality of Habre’s regime as recalled by Chadian survivors seeking justice and closure from the unimaginable trauma that they continue to suffer decades after.
Rosi’s eye-opening first-ever documentary could be his finest—he plants his camera on a boat along the holy Ganges River, capturing the assortment of sights, sounds and fervent opinions, as it meditates on the cycles of life and death.
This politically stirring and at times truly heartbreaking Golden Horse-winning documentary gives us that intense journalistic, on the ground experience of the 2019 Hong Kong protests from start to end.
Animated documentaries may be few and far between, but this is an affecting work that skilfully details an Afghan refugee’s harrowing life story fleeing from war and conflict, and more introspectively, from himself.
Eternality Tan 